There was one bright part of coming back home for the holidays (which I'll do again in a few weeks, God help me). My Dad dug out his videotape, many years old, of Dave Clark's special on the British music program Ready Steady Go!. The show was basically ground zero for the Mod movement of Swinging London. Any given show gave you The Rolling Stones (above, doing a great song off of Aftermath), The Beatles, The Who, Dusty Springfield as well as American soul acts like The Supremes, Martha Reeves and Vandellas and Otis Redding.
My Dad grew up on the show and I love the music of the time. The idea that you can tune into one show and get all that great music astounds me. The show wasn't like Top of the Pops with acts performing their singles on the chart. Artists weren't afraid to stretch out a bit. Here's The Who doing some of their Maximum R&B magic with a James Brown cover. You really can't get more Mod than four British white guys, one wearing a target on his shirt, doing their imitation of American soul music.
This has to be the best thing I saw on the special. Otis Redding, backed by The Bar-Kays, does a few songs. That's an understatement. He puts on a brilliant performance like only he can that encapsulates the music of the time. He starts off with his cover of "Satisfaction." Remember, Keith Richards imagined the song going more like Redding's version, with the horns playing the hook, than what The Stones did. Then he covers "My Girl." A Stax artist doing a Motown song, perhaps the Motown song. It's amazing how he just turns it out and gives it that Memphis edge, especially at the end. The clip ends with "Respect" and we get back in the "whose version is better?" argument. Aretha Franklin made the song her own but Redding's original version still has amazing power the way he and the band just blaze through it.
The amazing thing for me is to see white artists covering soul music while you have black artists doing The Stones and The Beatles (Redding and Franklin both did superb versions of "Elanor Rigby" and the bi-racial Booker T and The MG's covered all of Abbey Road). That conversation doesn't seem to exist in pop music and probably hasn't for over thirty years now. There's a radio station in L.A. called K-EARTH that's not classic rock but "oldies." Some '70s stuff has infiltrated their playlist but when I was growing up it was The Beatles next to The Temptations next to Elvis next to Otis up there. It was the only radio station playing music, except for the Top 40 stations, that had a multi-racial mix all the time. The classic rock stations didn't have Led Zeppelin after Parliment. There'd be some Hendrix but after that it's all white artists. It's something to think about. Sasha Frere-Jones does bring it up in his much discussed (much discussed here anyway) New Yorker article, although I believe he obscures the good points he makes.
I mean, we see Kanye West sampling Daft Punk and Thom Yorke and The Hives did employ Pharell to produce some songs on their latest album. And of course, there's the wonderful Go! Team. But we also have singer-songwriters doing smarmy covers of gangsta rap, which I think is the worst of both worlds. That's right, I'm the blogger brave enough to take on Dynamite Hack and Nina Gordon.
Comments:
A tiny snippet of that Who performance appears in the film The Kids Are Alright, but my introduction to Ready Steady Go was in the film version of Quadrophenia, in a scene where the mod hero watches the ‘Orrible ‘Oo on telly to the loud disapproval of his father, a moment everyone who was ever a teenager should be able to understand.
The Sasha Frere-Jones observation is also made by Brit critic Simon Reynolds in this review in Salon. I agree with everyone who misses that once-lively conversation between black and white pop...but one thing often overlooked (especially by British observers sincerely wondering why British pop can’t make a dent in America anymore) is that the cross-pollination we miss was an artifact of harshly imposed racial restrictions in the U.S. music industry. There was a time “race records” couldn’t be played on white stations, and British acts were introducing many white listeners to Negro sounds for the first time. Now that the Pat Boone segregationist days are over, there’s less of a role for “interpreters” to work across now-diminished racial divides.
# posted by RAB : 6:33 PM
That's a great article RAB. I've read some of Reynolds work before and enjoyed it.
I know it's a fact that it took some white guys from England to tell white America what was happening in their own country. I think something like Pat Boone is certainly a reflection of a segregated society. But the examples I used were happening in the '60s during the civil rights movement. I appreciate just as how the walls of segregation were being torn down the rules of pop music were changing, too.
I don't know, I don't think these comparisons stand up under close examination. I just wish things were more integrated, to use a loaded term.
# posted by Ian : 3:22 PM
Post a Comment
